3 ms·

I mostly agree with you, with one exception: > Remember: the whole point of the GPL is to reject copyright, and that specifically means lots of corporate freel

I mostly agree with you, with one exception: > Remember: the whole point of the GPL is to reject copyright, and that specifically means lots of corporate freeloading, because the whole point of copyright is to stop corporate freeloading I don't think this is true. My understanding (which could be flawed) is that the whole point of the GPL is to weaponize copyright in order to guarantee freedoms, not to reject it (a subtle but important distinction). Also the whole point of copyright doesn't seem to be to stop corporate freeloading, though that is of course part of it. It's point is to ensure that the original creator has rights to benefit from the work, whether that means getting stolen from by a huge corporation or stolen from by teenagers passing memes over the internet, or adapted by an individual/sole proprietor as part of some larger work, etc. My guess is we probably agree on this part and the debate is probably over semantics (i.e. you might have meant "business in general" by "corporate" rather than specific corporations).

dcow 3y ago
RMS famously refers to the GPL as a hack on the copyright system. It comes from an axiomatic belief that restricting copying in the computer age is fraught. To put yourself in the headspace, imagine the ivory tower discussion: look at how stupid this law is… don’t the plebeians know that computers copy data around the system and the network all the time to even function, literally digital would be dead if we actually enforced the letter of copyright law, oh and data is context dependent anyway so the same underlying data could manifest two wildly different concepts so you have to bind data and context not just allow people to claim rights to arbitrary strings of bits etc. etc. So it follows that copyright is harmful because if enforced it would dismantle cyberspace. The hack is to use copyright law to enforce licenses that perpetually reject copyright to make sure users have custody of their hardware and can’t be inhibited from freely running whatever combination of instructions they can dream up. A better reality would be something more akin to the world running arch linux and compiling every software from source (but we can’t have that because evil wealth extracting corporate automatons will steal your source, license it and sue you, hence copyleft). And since chefs can’t copyright recipes programmers shant copyright programs, which are just instructions that tell your machine how to achieve some outcome. You are free to sell the best tasting implementations of your programs as packaged SaaS software, though. Your value as a software chef is in the quality of the meals you serve not the knowledge of the specific ingredients used to create them.

dcow 3y ago

RMS famously refers to the GPL as a hack on the copyright system. It comes from an axiomatic belief that restricting copying in the computer age is fraught. To put yourself in the headspace, imagine the ivory tower discussion: look at how stupid this law is… don’t the plebeians know that computers copy data around the system and the network all the time to even function, literally digital would be dead if we actually enforced the letter of copyright law, oh and data is context dependent anyway so the same underlying data could manifest two wildly different concepts so you have to bind data and context not just allow people to claim rights to arbitrary strings of bits etc. etc. So it follows that copyright is harmful because if enforced it would dismantle cyberspace. The hack is to use copyright law to enforce licenses that perpetually reject copyright to make sure users have custody of their hardware and can’t be inhibited from freely running whatever combination of instructions they can dream up. A better reality would be something more akin to the world running arch linux and compiling every software from source (but we can’t have that because evil wealth extracting corporate automatons will steal your source, license it and sue you, hence copyleft). And since chefs can’t copyright recipes programmers shant copyright programs, which are just instructions that tell your machine how to achieve some outcome. You are free to sell the best tasting implementations of your programs as packaged SaaS software, though. Your value as a software chef is in the quality of the meals you serve not the knowledge of the specific ingredients used to create them.